A couple of days ago I released a new Drupal module called Navigate. Navigate is basically the second version Super Nav, which I put together so that I could move my clients over Drupal with a less painful acclimation period. Drupal is awesome in so, so many ways, but as has been repeated over and over - it's just not set up for site administrators to find what they need and get there fast.

There have been some relatively simple modules put out there to help tackle this problem, and they work surprisingly well, like the ever-popular Admin Menu, and Teleport. DHTML menus helps reduce page reloads while navigating through sub-menus. All very cool stuff that shows us just how it doesn't take that much work to layer some additional tools onto Drupal's fantastic infrastructure to address some of the usability issues there.

Navigate is a multi-purpose, customizable navigation tool that hides nicely if some of your admins decide they don't like it. The video above demonstrates some of the major features, like re-usable widgets, ajax-search, favorites, and collapsible menus. In a matter of seconds, you can build your own navigation widget set to get around Drupal the way that works best for you. Re-sorting widgets, adding new widgets and deleting widgets are all done via drag-and-drop with ajax, so no page reloads are needed.

I've put together what I hope is a decent widget API so that module contributors can easily hook some of their features into Navigate widgets. API documentation will be forthcoming.

For users of Super Nav, this is a bit of a different beast, and much more tame. Super Nav used a frameset to separate navigation from the theme, which kept the Super Nav issue queue bustling with problems. I tried my best to bend framesets to my will (and it's surprising what you can do with javascript in that respect), but the release of Navigate marks the end of an era for me. While I once thought that bringing framesets back out from their slow decline over the years might help tackle navigation issues, I now I have a more seasoned, practical view.

My hope is that the Drupal community will enjoy this new contribution, and that it does some part in demonstrating a possible solution for integrating administrative tools with otherwise user-based theming.